10.22.08
Road Trip: Professor’s book on bus travel reveals portrait of America
In today’s show, adapted from an article written by Anne Broomley, Senior Writer, Editor for UVa’s Office of Public Affairs, we look at the University of Virginia’s Kath Weston and the journey that led to her new book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor.
Author Kath Weston, an Anthropology PhD from Stanford University, grew up in a working-class family and attended college with the help of financial aid, took her first bus trip alone when she was 16, and that unforgettable trip showed her that traveling on the bus was much more than just a way to get somewhere.
Before joining the University of Virginia faculty this fall, she spent more than five years crisscrossing the nation on buses, chronicling the lives of Americans who travel via the least expensive mass transportation option. She refers to her new book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor, as a journey full of unexpected richness. Her new book describes her fellow passengers’ colorful humanity and tackles issues of class, race and dubious access to America’s opportunities.
Weston said she wanted her social commentary to reveal “the artistry of living poor”—the ingenuity of getting by in a system that often fails to reckon with the widening material gap between rich and poor.
The book’s introduction says “By riding the buses, I hoped to get at aspects of living poor that have eluded community studies of poverty… The road trip has become its own American art form, yet few have bothered to chronicle what happens when people without money take to the road.”
Along the way, the riders she traveled with might have been struggling, hungry or penniless, but she found they were also helpful, creative and philosophical.
For example, take T. J… Traveling in Flagstaff, Arizona , he was almost arrested because a white woman, who was probably insane, thought he was a witch and started screaming at him in a bus terminal snack bar, bringing the police. They were about to haul off T.J., who was black, but a white trucker from the bus talked them out of it.
The trucker loved the road, he said, but he had to give up his rig to have surgery—that’s why he was riding the bus.
When everyone got back on the bus, a Hispanic man walked back to T.J., handing him a foil-wrapped package of burritos his wife had made. It turned out T.J. had no money to buy food as he rode to Oklahoma, en route to a new job in a meat-processing plant.
Then there is a story of a divorced middle-aged man, who had custody of his daughter during the summer. So he took her on the bus for the only kind of vacation he could afford, to show her another side of America.
Or, the story of a teenage girl, traveling from one city to another, looking for her younger brother, whose mother had taken off with him and then left him someplace. The sister didn’t know much more than that.
Then, there is the soon-to-be all too familiar story of a once-middle-class woman, who fell onto harder times when her now-deceased husband was laid off. She told Weston, she hated taking the bus, and even though it was obvious why, the woman stood up for a non-English-speaking passenger when the bus driver started yelling at him. She also changed seats so a young woman and her toddler could sit next to each other.
With America’s appetite for travel and adventure alive and well, and the shrinking economy looming as a back drop, Weston’s story of kindness and humanity, in spite of hardship may become a more familiar one for millions in this country. And, a tale of humility and grace that may salvage the American ideal, in the face of the difficult times ahead.
You’ve been listening to the Oscar Show, I’m Jacob Canon. Join us next week when we will preview the upcoming Virginia Film Festival.